Latency

The combination of CTE (Chunked Transfer Encoding) with CMAF (Common Media Application Format) promises to deliver content with lower latency than with typical delivery of CMAF-encoded and packaged content. The CMAF+CTE examples that have been deployed have all been demonstrating 3 or more seconds of latency, which is significantly longer than Phenix’s < 0.5-second latency.

Scale

In addition, no CMAF + CTE (Chunked Transfer Encoding) deployments have demonstrated the ability to deliver content at scale. Phenix has proven scale both vertically - serving clients with 200,000+ concurrent viewer events every day - and horizontally - serving clients streaming 1000 channels simultaneously. 

Fundamental Technology Stability

The technology fundamentals of the CMAF+CTE approach prevent it from providing a stable solution with high quality video at < 1 second. CMAF+CTE is built on HTTP and TCP which are designed for reliability of data transfer vs. real-time. The Phenix Interactive Transport Protocol (ITP) is built on top of the W3C standard called WebRTC (built on top of UDP instead of TCP), which is designed for real-time communications. This difference is necessary in order to gain the flexibility to handle network events like packet loss and jitter and maintain real-time latencies.

Synchronization

CMAF + CTE does not provide a mechanism for audience synchronization. The Phenix solution does provide audience synchronization, allowing the audience to interact with one another, as everyone watching the same thing at the same time.

Summary